I was holding a baseball bat and had it raised beside my head, ready to swing at a moment’s notice.
Close enough to the barn now that we could hear a shuffling sound from inside. Feet against floorboards. We listened for a moment, then Carl looked at me and held up one hand as if he were giving the peace sign.
I nodded. Definitely no more than two in there. Any more and the noise would’ve been less furtive.
Carl glanced toward the side of the door, communicating with his eyes, and I slid into position beside it.
Lowering the bat, I touched the knob with one hand so lightly that there wasn’t even the slightest rattle. Carl had dropped to one knee directly in front of the door and had his pistol leveled in front of him.
He stared straight ahead as we listened to the sounds from within. Finally, he nodded. Nothing more really than just a dip of the chin.
I flung the door open and immediately raised the bat in one fluid motion, ready for anything that might come charging through the entrance.
Instead, we heard voices from within, quickly followed by the unmistakable sound of shotguns being shucked.
“What the fuck?”
Carl quickly stood, raising his palms in front of him to show he meant no harm.
“Human.” he called out. “Humans here. Don’t shoot!”
He walked slowly through the doorway, keeping his hands raised as if he were a prisoner and I fell into line behind him.
“We don’t mean no harm. We just need a place to rest for a spell. To get warm. Then we’ll be moving on.”
Our original assessment had been correct: there were two men in the barn, both pointing shotguns in our direction. They seemed skittish, which was understandable as we had just burst into their refuge.
There was a large stump that someone had drug into the barn, probably to use as a seat or table, and Carl slowly began to lower his pistol toward it, making sure to keep his palms facing the frightened men.
“Look, I’m puttin’ down my weapon, see? We ain’t looking for trouble, guys. It’s just me and the lady. A couple hours and we’ll be out of your hair. We just need to rest.”
Something about the men made me nervous and I wasn’t sure what. They looked like any other survivors we’d encountered: shabby clothes ripped and stained with fluids you didn’t want to ponder for too long, hair a stringy tangled mess, faces lean from hunger and roughened by exposure to the elements. But there was this feeling that I couldn’t shake: a queasy nervousness as if I had just encountered some entirely new life form, perhaps a human-rotter hybrid.
I wanted to tell Carl to tuck the gun back into his pants instead of placing it on the stump, to tell him to keep it close at hand. But, at the same time, I felt slightly silly. So far, these men had given me no reason to distrust them. In fact, they looked just as frightened as I probably had when Carl and Doc first found me back in that silo.
“See, fellas. I’m not armed. Name’s Carl. This here’s Josie. We don’t want no trouble.”
The one with the red beard turned to his companion and whispered something. The other one, who I’d begun to think of as Scarface due to the pink gash that covered his left cheek, furrowed his brow and whispered something back.
“Look, Carl, let’s just go and find…. ”
“We got food. Not a lot, but we’ll be happy to share.”
The two men finally began to lower their shotguns and it was almost as if I could see the tension melt from Carl’s back and shoulders. I, however, was still uneasy.
“I’m Roscoe.” the redhead said. “This here’s Freddy.”
Freddy nodded but remained silent as the pair walked over to the stump and placed their guns beside Carl’s weapons.
“You folks from around here?”
Neither one of them answered for a moment and I could feel their eyes on me. It had always made me uncomfortable when men would appraise me with a leer, their gazes lingering on my breasts as if they defined my entire worth as a person. I shuffled closer to Carl who somehow seemed oblivious to my nervousness.
Finally Freddy spoke.
“From up north. Heading south out of this fucking cold shit. You said you got food?”
“Yeah, in my pack.”
In the center of the room I could see where they had made a pile of hay and began piling scraps of wood and timber on top. They began walking toward it and we followed.
“Looks like you fellas were getting fixed to have a nice little campfire. Sorry we scared you like that. Thought there were rotters in here.”
The redhead walked into the shadows and I heard the creaking and splintering of a plank being ripped from a stall. Carl had taken his pack off and was rummaging through the piles of clothing for the canned vegetables that were in the bottom.
Freddy said nothing but shook a cigarette out of a crumpled pack and lit it with the flick of a lighter. At the sound, Carl’s head snapped up for a fraction of a second.
“Say, friend,” he said, “you reckon I can get one of those off you? Been about three days since I ran out. Three long days.”
Freddy blew a slow plume of smoke from his puckered lips and I felt his eyes crawling over me again. Though covered by layers of clothing, I somehow felt as if I were as exposed and vulnerable as if I were standing naked before him. After what seemed to be an eternity, Freddy finally replied.
“Tell you what, partner.” he said. “You let me play with your girl’s big ’ole titties for as long as it takes for you to smoke it and we got a deal.”
“
Carl stood quickly and stepped to the side so that his body shielded me from view.
“Look,” he said, “ I reckon it might be best for us to just move along now.”
His words were short and clipped, his jaw set at that particular angle it got when he was upset about something.
“Best of luck to you fellas.”
He stooped back down to re-zip his pack when there was a blur of movement. Without warning, the redhead had charged from the shadows with a two by four clutched in his hands.
Growling like an animal, he swung and I heard a sickening thud as it slammed into the side of Carl’s head. Almost immediately, Carl slumped to the ground and I turned to run but it was too late. I felt hands grab the back of my jacket and push me forward so forcibly that my feet got all tangled in each other.
I feel forward and my forehead crashed into hard, unforgiving wood with enough force that bursts of light exploded before my eyes.
I felt dizzy and nauseous as I rolled over onto my back and the room seemed to swim in and out of focus.
Roscoe had dropped the two-by-four and was in the process of pulling a hunting knife from a belt sheath; Freddy was walking toward me, undoing the zipper and button on his jeans as a cold smile spread across his face.
Everything went dark for a second and reality struggled to reclaim its grip. Bits of the barn disappeared into shadows only to reemerge seconds later. The man before me wavered in and out of focus and everything sounded as if I were hearing it through the other side of a wall.
“You’re gonna like this, girlie. But probably not as much as me.”
Laughter.
“Go ahead and kill that one. No use for him. Once he’s out of the way we can take as much time as we need with this little beauty here.”
I tried to raise my head, to scramble backward but there was a ringing in my ears now so loud that it made
